Tag Archives: team work

I am a newbie tester (Not so newbie at this moment because I have made significant progress in my learning) and explorer exploring many things and enjoying testing at Test Insane. Test Insane is a cool and lovely place to work because the work culture is very much unique. People working here are cool, freedom is given to me to share my ideas and thoughts and there is no seniority between people, everyone are given equal priority.

Santhosh Tuppad, is the Founder & Managing Director at Test Insane. He doesn’t show any ego and cares about employee’s happiness a lot. His way of training is very unique. Each thing he says will last in my brain and make me think in different ways. For instance, he used to explain about a tool that would be useful for testing an product and will ask us to practice using the tool, so it will make me think in different angles as how to use the tool effectively and find bugs.

On my second day at Test Insane. Santhosh asked me to edit my twitter profile since it was not good. I took it lightly and did not do it. One day in office Santhosh called me to his place, he asked me to login in to my Twitter

Pranav working at TestInsane!

account using my credential. I was wondering why? After login, he asked me about my passion and interest. He edited the details, he also asked me to follow few testing groups such as TestManiac and “Testing circus”. He asked me to follow ten testers a day and to read their profile. I did the same. Initially, I did not understand the importance, but as days passed by I came to know about many things related to testing by reading the blog post of experienced tester and also about many tools and tips from different testing groups. It’s helping me a lot.

Santhosh gives lots of importance to status update mail which I need to send daily. He checks for spelling mistakes, punctuation and grammatical errors in it. Initially, I used to make spelling mistake, punctuation errors. I was careless, but Santhosh used to point out my mistake in the mail and he asked me to re-send it again. So, I learned how to give proper punctuation in sentence (Who would have Wren and Martin book in Testing start-up? Well, Test Insane has it and that speaks about the seriousness of Santhosh Tuppad about communication skill). I was thinking why Santhosh is focusing so much in punctuation and spacing. But, It was all for my good. He wants other people to respect me. It also helps me a lot while Bug Reporting. If I report a bug with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, it will create a bad impression on me from the client. Now, I am very careful while reporting the bugs in the bug tracker.

Everyone at Test Insane, appreciates me for every small thing which I do. Even if it is a small utility. They used to appreciate me and tell their views about it. This give me the confidence and the hunger to learn and do more.

Sandeep Tuppad, is the Vice President (Mobile Apps Testing) of Test Insane. He helps a lot to master test automation using Selenium. He used to give me challenges or tasks regarding automation. Instead of just learning from a book or training session. This way of practical learning will be very interesting, and also I get to know many things. One day Sandeep gave me a task to create a utility to automate the process of checking brute-force attack vulnerability in the login form of any website. While creating this utility, I learned many things. I learned how to fetch data from excel sheet using java program, debugging a program using Eclipse etc. I used to create a part of the utility and show it to Sandeep, he used to tell me any modification required for the utility. After completing the utility, I was testing it on multiple websites. Fortunately, I found out a way to bypass the website that use CAPTCHA to prevent this test. While completing the challenges that Sandeep gives me, I got to know many things apart from Selenium. This is how I am learning Selenium at Test Insane.

Test Insane has also given me an opportunity to attend meet-up conducted by TestManiac every month. One of the interesting meet-up I have attended is regarding, “Which is the most important quality criterion to be tested on a product?” By attending the meet-up, I got to know many things regarding testing. I also meet different people from various different companies and get a chance to listen about their testing experience and the methodology which they follow.

BugIT is a platform launched by Test Insane for internal purpose where testers can practice testing and report bugs which will eventually become huge database of bugs which will help newbie testers like me to learn better. It helps me a lot to stay alert and think as a tester even while browsing website and it also gives me confidence when I find a bug.

Test Insane apps help me a lot while testing. For example: Software Testing MindMaps repository is too awesome! Each mindmap in the repository of Test Insane apps is very useful. I was testing a file upload feature in a website. A mind map regarding file upload testing was very useful. Creating a mindmap before testing a product will be very helpful. Since we can keep track of all the features we have tested in a product and also our brains thinks in a connective way, so it makes it easy to remember.

My first month experience with Test Insane was cool, I learned many things and I also created my first utility. Looking forward to create more utilities that may be helpful for testing community and make great impact in Test Insane. I thank Santhosh Tuppad for giving me the opportunity.

We started our journey during April 2014 and we went through lots of changes in the way we were working due to whatsoever reasons. There were boring days and at the end of the day there is no sense of accomplishment after sitting at office for 8 hours and doing something which did not make us happy. Some people joined our team initially and they left us for good. There were non-technical problems and I never wanted to spend time on non-technical part more compared to technical part of running a tech start-up. The good thing is, I always fixed the problems right-away and instructed the team to do focus on technical things, innovation and more while I take care of things that are under my control. Thereafter, we knew what we had to do collectively as a team and rock the Software Testing space.

No projects, NO BIG DEAL!

We did not have projects for many months, maybe time was the answer. Instead of cribbing about “we are not getting projects”, we said, “FUCK, let us start with some in-house projects and then started to brainstorm“. We started feeling happy and awesome about that time we spend at our startup. An idea hit us and that was, “How about open-source / freeware for software testers around the globe?” And we were like, “That’s kick-ass stuff!” Let us do it. Our rock-star developers started working on building open source apps and then we started to release them under MIT license. We do not like * (conditions apply) when its open-source / free.

Our team-members & contributors

We kick-started our journey with our first utility developed in python and that was HCE (HTML parser / HTML comment extractor). It was developed by our C, Python, and Java programmer Sandeep Tuppad. He loves neat code and with his support, we were able to release our first utility as open-source on web.

Test Insane – Software Testing Community Contribution 2014 and 2015

Later, it was a surprise when our rock-star developer Karthik Kini (The C# and the Web guy) developed RTE (RestFul Test Endpoints) and said, “Hey Santhosh, here is something I have developed and we can offer as micro-service to the world which could help developers / testers to test”. And I was like, “INSANE”.

And the BIG thing of 2014 was on the way and that was an idea about “Developing software testing mind-maps and uploading them on our own platform of mind-maps repository”. Karthik Kini being the Web Guy was agile in developing the platform and then we invited / requested testers around the world to contribute. Today, we have 100+ mind-maps and 16+ contributors who develop the testing mind-maps and then we upload them in MindMaps repository.

What’s up with 2015?

We have realized that, it is time to make MONEY now & we halt these activities it is not ONE TIME activity, but a journey where we keep contributing to the Software Testing community. The simple reason is, we love the journey of being happy in our life and contributing to the testing community in terms of open-source apps, freebies makes us feel insanely happy!

Watch out for more in 2015! We are going to explode enormously in 2015 in terms of community contribution.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SPEAKING ABOUT?

Often we see the debate on software testing forums and other social media platforms like twitter, LinkedIn and others where testers speak about “Testers must code”, “Testers need to learn a scripting or a programming language” and other kind of statements. We never want to get into such debates or group discussion as we are clear with what we need to do at Test Insane and collectively do better in testing a software.

OUR WAY

We at Test Insane Software Testing Services have team of exploratory software testers who focus on learning to test better while we also have passionate developers who come with extensive experience in programming. Now, there are several things we learn together which is mutual benefit to our customers and us! Our developers help in building test frameworks, tiny utilities, check automation continuous integration implementation, and finding bugs as well from the code review. And they also learn some of the aspects from our exploratory testers about what doesn’t work well and our developers even come up with the counter-measure. There have been times when we have given the fixes in the bug reports, we do not hesitate to give the fixes even though our customers didn’t ask for it, because we believe that we are helping our customers and we will do everything and anything to test the software better and collectively make a faster progress.

Developers and Testers Together in Testing

DO WHAT YOU LOVE TO PHILOSOPHY!

At Test Insane, we love to utilize the skills instead of forcing someone to do something which they hate to or do not like to! We identify the areas in which our team is great at and we help the team nurture the skills which they are good at. The intention is to do better testing and well, we are doing it by having developers and testers together instead of saying, “Testers must code”. We proudly say, “Testers Must Test” and “Developers Must Code” while we use the combo of both and rock testing activity for our customers. We unite and we rock! We do not like a basketball player practicing cricket as well! The world is beautiful when people follow their heart and do what they love to! Having said that, if there is a person who likes to test and code; we would encourage him to do so because that’s what he / she loves to do. Follow your heart and stay happy!

CULTURE PLAYS AN IMPORTANT ROLE TOO

We see that developers generally not respecting testers as they are poorly skilled and not being credible. Some of the statements by developer could be (At least what we have seen in India), “Oh, you just test it man; I have to fix it which is challenging”, “Testing is easy and anyone can do it man” and many other statements which are demotivating or discouraging. Well, we will not deny those comments from a developer because testers with whom he / she is working do not have good enough skills and it is fair enough in that context (There is no generalization)!

Now, the culture at Test Insane is insane! We never felt testers and developers work in an isolated fashion. Till date, we do not feel he / she is a developer or a developer feeling “he / she is a tester”. We see it as a one team who rock the work. Everyone in our team respects each other irrespective of what role they are playing. That’s what makes an insane team. As Test Insane has skilled testers and developers, there are no negative comments because everyone understands the credibility of a team member.

Culture is important and in the context of Test Insane, this idea works where we bridge the gap between developers and testers in testing to help the customer by testing better. In other organizations filled with ego, discouragement, no good enough skills etc. may not work. Sometimes, it is better to keep things separated based on many attributes. It works for us and we are happy working together and we shall continue to do so!

We build great teams! Want to work in our team? Write to us at iaminsane@testinsane.com explaining why you want to work with is and what makes you insane in computer world! We would like to see the writing in insane format instead of formal way. Let there be attitude!